𝐃 𝐗 𝐌 𝐈 𝐍 𝐈 𝐐

There’s a shelf in my living room. My husband and I share it. His books are on one side, mine on the other, separated by two thin shelves like a border no one respects. Most of my books are unread. I pick them up, put them down, forget why I wanted them in the first place. Time feels too precious to waste on reading, which is ridiculous because I waste it anyway — on my phone, scrolling, refreshing, forgetting why I even picked it up.

The only time I read like it mattered was when I was in school. Back then, reading was work. It wasn’t about being smart or interesting. It was just what you did. You read because you had to, and sometimes you liked it.

Now, reading feels corny. Social media made it corny. People stacking books into little towers, holding up shiny covers like trophies. I don’t trust any of it. I read for myself. I’m picky. That pickiness came from years of assigned reading, from being told what mattered and what didn’t, from watching teachers wrinkle their noses at the wrong kind of books. Romance novels, for example. I love them. I read them incorrigibly, even though they don’t match the degrees I paid for.

But I’ve started to think my bookshelf isn’t about taste. It’s more like a fossil record — proof of what I’ve wanted, what I’ve chased, what I thought might save me at any given time. Walter Benjamin said something about that in Unpacking My Library. A shelf isn’t just a list of books. It’s the story of how you got them, why you needed them, who you thought you’d be after reading them. Books are like souvenirs from failed versions of yourself.

A lot of my books are poetry. Some because I love poetry, some because I was getting a degree in it and didn’t know how else to belong. Billy Collins said writers spend most of their lives reading. I also studied philosophy, so I collected books full of difficult sentences explaining simple ideas. I liked the feeling of surviving them.

But the truth is, nothing beats walking into a bookstore, picking up a random book, and convincing yourself it’ll change your life. Sometimes it does. Most of the time it doesn’t.

When I was younger, I read to escape. Now I read to reclaim. I just finished a book — one chapter a day, no underlining, no performance — and it felt good. The kind of good you don’t need to tell anyone about. I didn’t check my phone once. No alerts. No reminders that the world was still happening.

We’re not running out of time. We’re giving it away. Reading a book — or an old photocopy from a class I forgot I took — or the ingredients on a bottle of soap — it’s all the same. It’s all practice. It’s all a way to take something back from the feed. To remember that I’m still here. That I can write things down, by hand, in my own notebook, just for myself. That not everything has to be a subscription or a performance.

This is when I decided to get off my phone.